VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 18, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- This year's TED Prize winner – Charmian Gooch of Global Witness – has announced that she will use the prestigious million-dollar award "to make it impossible for criminals and corrupt dictators to hide behind anonymous companies." The announcement was made live and online from the TED stage in Vancouver, with support from leading members of the business, political, law enforcement and campaigning community.

Delivering a powerful talk, Charmian described the abuse of anonymous companies as a "devastating problem that spans the globe…negatively affecting all of us." Describing the ease with which people can hide their identities behind anonymous companies, Gooch recounted harrowing tales of the impact of this problem, particularly on some of the poorest people in the world. She called on leaders around the globe to make a simple commitment "to enact laws to create public registries which list the true owners of companies, and that can be accessed by all – with no loopholes."

"My wish is for us to know who owns and controls companies, so that they can no longer be used anonymously against the public good. Let's ignite world opinion, change the law, and together launch a new era of openness in business."

Since 2005, the TED Prize has been awarded to an exceptional individual with a creative and bold vision to spark global change. The $1 million dollar award, combined with the resources of the TED community, helps conceive and launch a high-impact project – and brings this powerful idea to a global stage.

Charmian Gooch is one of three Co-Founders and Directors of Global Witness – a non-profit organization that, for 20 years, has run pioneering investigations and campaigns uncovering the links between natural resources, corruption and conflict. Global Witness's research and campaigning has made the organization a leading global voice on what can be done to stamp out the abuse of anonymous companies.

"Every year, we award the TED Prize to an inspirational individual tackling a critical issue – from education and environmental degradation to the power of art to give people a voice," said Chris Anderson, TED Curator. "We are thrilled to award Charmian Gooch the 2014 TED Prize and further Global Witness's ongoing work to challenge global corruption. As a pro-business entrepreneur, I am thrilled to see this year's prize being used to make business more transparent."

"I'm honoured and excited to have been given this award," saidCharmian Gooch, Global Witness Co-Founder and Director. "I can't imagine a better stage to launch a global conversation and campaign to stop anonymous companies being used to steal, evade tax and loot billions from some of the world's poorest countries. As a lifelong campaigner, I know this devastating problem is fixable if we work together. But we need your support. Whoever you are, whatever you do, you can help - please join the conversation, show your support and help us inspire action."

The TED Prize will also have support from a wish advisory board. Members include: Jamie Drummond, Co-Founder and Executive Director of ONE; Julie McCarthy, Director of the Fiscal Governance Program at Open Society Foundations; Sally Osberg, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation; Jeff Skoll, Founder and Chairman of the Skoll Foundation, the Skoll Global Threats Fund, Participant Media, and the first President of eBay; and Mo Ibrahim, Founder and Chair of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. All have added their support to the wish, as well as their expertise, advice and continued practical support.

"Charmian Gooch's 'wish' is the right move at the right time. Trillions of dollars have been lost over the last decade to illicit money flows from corrupt deals in the developing world," said Jeff Skoll, Founder and Chairman of the Skoll Foundation, and the first President of eBay. "Charmian and Global Witness received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship earlier this month because their quest to expose corruption, conflict, and environmental degradation is poised to put an end to the 'resource course' that has kept millions of the world's poorest people in poverty."

"I've seen the harm that poor governance and a lack of accountability has caused across the developing world, which is why as a philanthropist and a businessman I support Charmian's TED wish to fight corruption and to end anonymous companies," saidMo Ibrahim, Founder and Chair of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.

Law enforcement has also chosen to support the wish. Jon Adler, National President of the US Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA),said: "The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) would like to recognize Charmian Gooch and Global Witness for their unrelenting leadership on the corporate transparency campaign. As supported in bi-partisan legislation currently in Congress, we must eliminate the corporate fox-holes that criminals cower in, and ensure business accountability and transparency. Requiring corporate filers to disclose who the beneficiaries are isn't an invasion of privacy; it's a proclamation of integrity."

ACTION STEPSThe TED Prize wish signals the start of a conversation and action to create a global movement for change. To achieve success, Charmian and Global Witness are looking to TED and its extended community to:

Join the movement for global change

Build a global movement to make it impossible for criminals and others to hide behind anonymous companies. Global Witness – along with partners around the world – is leading a campaign to end anonymous companies.

Help create the first-ever prototype of a public registry for collecting and publishing critical information on who ultimately owns a company. This prototype will serve as a guide for governments that want to end anonymous companies.

Help us make this prototype public registry a reality. Email us at [email protected] to contribute funds and technical expertise.

Convene the business community

Transparency is good for businesses and consumers. We all want to know whom we're buying from and whom we're doing business with. If you own or work in a company — big or small, publicly listed or privately held—join the global campaign, take part in the conversation, and support this wish.

We're going to bring together as many companies as possible to a meeting in NYC to figure out how we can collectively advance a movement away from anonymous companies, and towards transparency. Join us. Email [email protected].

Add your businesses name to those calling for an end to anonymous companies. Email [email protected]

Tell the story

Creatives, animators, broadcasters, photographers, and app designers: this wish needs you. The story of anonymous companies and their effect on real people's lives remains largely untold. Bring your communicative and artistic gifts to bear on this global problem and, in doing so, inspire others to act.

Email [email protected] if you have an idea and want to collaborate with us, and our partners around the world.

About the TED Prize The first TED Prize was awarded in 2005, born out of the TED Conference and a vision by the world's leading entrepreneurs, innovators, and entertainers to change the world – one wish at a time. The original prize: $100,000 and the TED community's range of talent and expertise. What began as an unparalleled experiment to leverage the resources of the TED community has evolved into a $1 million award and an ambitious effort to spur global-scale change.

From Bono's the ONE Campaign ('05 recipient) to Jamie Oliver 's Food Revolution ('10 recipient) to JR's Inside Out Project ('11 recipient) and Sugata Mitra's School in a Cloud ('13 recipient), the TED Prize has helped to combat poverty, take on religious intolerance, improve global health, tackle child obesity, advance education, and inspire art around the world.

About Global Witness Founded in 1993, Global Witness is a UK non-profit organization based in London and Washington DC. Global Witness investigates and campaigns to change the system by exposing the economic networks behind conflict, corruption and environmental destruction. The organization focuses on undertaking hard-hitting investigations into matters of public interest that expose the companies, the corrupt, the bankers, the corporate executives, and the middlemen of various kinds who willfully enable corruption to take place on a grand scale. Global Witness reports on these matters, and launches campaigns that change the terms of debate and set the global agenda.

Chuck Piluso presented a study of cloud adoption trends and the power and flexibility of IBM Power and Pureflex cloud solutions.
Prior to Secure Infrastructure and Services, Mr. Piluso founded North American Telecommunication Corporation, a facilities-based Competitive Local Exchange Carrier licensed by the Public Service Commission in 10 states, serving as the company's chairman and president from 1997 to 2000.
Between 1990 and 1997, Mr. Piluso served as chairman & founder of International Te...

The Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), which enables organizations to seamlessly run in a hybrid cloud model (public + private cloud), is here to stay. IDC estimates that the software-defined networking market will be valued at $3.7 billion by 2016.
Security is a key component and benefit of the SDDC, and offers an opportunity to build security 'from the ground up' and weave it into the environment from day one.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Reuven Harrison, CTO and Co-Founder of Tufin,...

Container technology is sending shock waves through the world of cloud computing. Heralded as the 'next big thing,' containers provide software owners a consistent way to package their software and dependencies while infrastructure operators benefit from a standard way to deploy and run them. Containers present new challenges for tracking usage due to their dynamic nature. They can also be deployed to bare metal, virtual machines and various cloud platforms. How do software owners track the usag...

SYS-CON Events announced today that MobiDev, a software development company, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
MobiDev is a software development company with representative offices in Atlanta (US), Sheffield (UK) and Würzburg (Germany); and development centers in Ukraine. Since 2009 it has grown from a small group of passionate engineers and business managers to a full-scale mobi...

With SaaS use rampant across organizations, how can IT departments track company data and maintain security? More and more departments are commissioning their own solutions and bypassing IT. A cloud environment is amorphous and powerful, allowing you to set up solutions for all of your user needs: document sharing and collaboration, mobile access, e-mail, even industry-specific applications.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Shawn Mills, President and a founder of Green House Data, discussed h...

For IoT to grow as quickly as analyst firms’ project, a lot is going to fall on developers to quickly bring applications to market. But the lack of a standard development platform threatens to slow growth and make application development more time consuming and costly, much like we’ve seen in the mobile space.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mike Weiner, Product Manager of the Omega DevCloud with KORE Telematics Inc., discussed the evolving requirements for developers as IoT matures and conducte...

There are many considerations when moving applications from on-premise to cloud. It is critical to understand the benefits and also challenges of this migration. A successful migration will result in lower Total Cost of Ownership, yet offer the same or higher level of robustness.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Michael Meiner, an Engineering Director at Oracle, Corporation, analyzed a range of cloud offerings (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and discussed the benefits/challenges of migrating to each offe...

One of the hottest areas in cloud right now is DRaaS and related offerings.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Dale Levesque, Disaster Recovery Product Manager with Windstream's Cloud and Data Center Marketing team, will discuss the benefits of the cloud model, which far outweigh the traditional approach, and how enterprises need to ensure that their needs are properly being met.

In their session at 17th Cloud Expo, Hal Schwartz, CEO of Secure Infrastructure & Services (SIAS), and Chuck Paolillo, CTO of Secure Infrastructure & Services (SIAS), provide a study of cloud adoption trends and the power and flexibility of IBM Power and Pureflex cloud solutions.
In his role as CEO of Secure Infrastructure & Services (SIAS), Hal Schwartz provides leadership and direction for the company.

In a recent research, analyst firm IDC found that the average cost of a critical application failure is $500,000 to $1 million per hour and the average total cost of unplanned application downtime is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion per year for Fortune 1000 companies. In addition to the findings on the cost of the downtime, the research also highlighted best practices for development, testing, application support, infrastructure, and operations teams.

"We've just seen a huge influx of new partners coming into our ecosystem, and partners building unique offerings on top of our API set," explained Seth Bostock, Chief Executive Officer at IndependenceIT, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 16th Cloud Expo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.

SYS-CON Events announced today that HPM Networks will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
For 20 years, HPM Networks has been integrating technology solutions that solve complex business challenges. HPM Networks has designed solutions for both SMB and enterprise customers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mobile, social, Big Data, and cloud have fundamentally changed the way we live. “Anytime, anywhere” access to data and information is no longer a luxury; it’s a requirement, in both our personal and professional lives. For IT organizations, this means pressure has never been greater to deliver meaningful services to the business and customers.

The Internet of Everything (IoE) brings together people, process, data and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before – transforming information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. IoE creates new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented opportunities to improve business and government operations, decision making and mission support capabilities.

Puppet Labs has announced the next major update to its flagship product: Puppet Enterprise 2015.2. This release includes new features providing DevOps teams with clarity, simplicity and additional management capabilities, including an all-new user interface, an interactive graph for visualizing infrastructure code, a new unified agent and broader infrastructure support.

“Dad, if my character dies in the game, would I die in the real world?”
What a beautifully naive question that my son, Trevor, asked me during a son-dad conversation about how games might change over the years.
Earlier last year, Mattel’s CEO, Bryan Stockton, was fired. After three years, it was clear that Mattel was continuing to be challenged with sales weakness, and lower gross margins, which...

You often hear the two titles of "DevOps" and "Immutable Infrastructure" used independently.
In his session at DevOps Summit, John Willis, Technical Evangelist for Docker, covered the union between the two topics and why this is important. He provided an overview of Immutable Infrastructure then showed how an Immutable Continuous Delivery pipeline can be applied as a best practice for "DevOps." ...

The majority of an organization’s revenues are dependent on suppliers, distributors and other third parties. But as Benjamin M. Lawsky, New York State’s Superintendent of Financial Services, points out: “Unfortunately, those third-party firms can provide a back-door entrance to hackers who are seeking to steal sensitive bank customer data.”
By now most everyone is well aware of the major data bre...

Tableau Software and big data analytics platforms come together to provide visualization benefits for those seeking more than just crunched numbers.
The next BriefingsDirect big data innovation discussion highlights how Tableau Software and big data analytics platforms come together to provide visualization benefits for those seeking more than just crunched numbers. They're looking for ways to im...

Conservation International (CI) in Arlington, Virginia uses new technology to pursue more data about what's going on in tropical forests and other ecosystems around the world.
As a non-profit, they have a goal of a sustainable planet, but we're going to learn how they've learned to measure what was once unmeasurable -- and then to share that data to promote change and improvement.

The concept behind the Internet of Things has been around for a while now, ATMs being some of the first enterprise, hardened, network-connected, managed devices for mainstream consumer use. So too with our mobile phones, these are not new concepts to network technicians or hardware geeks. But for the rest of us, we simply never imagined the extents that the "ubiquity of connectedness" would take a...

Business and IT leaders today need better application delivery capabilities to support critical new innovation. But how often do you hear objections to improving application delivery like, "I can harden it against attack, but not on this timeline"; "I can make it better, but it will cost more"; "I can deliver faster, but not with these specs"; or "I can stay strong on cost control, but quality wil...

Learn how the IoT Cloud will power the world of tomorrow and why managing IoT through the cloud is as important as cloud computing itself. Learn how the devices of tomorrow will work on business models that reflect a new business strategy and a way to consume services.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ian Khan, Manager, Innovation & Marketing at Solgenia, will discuss how powered by the cloud and...

The Federal Government’s “Cloud First” policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a mandatory government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and con...

Do the ‘darker’ channels and means that exist for searching the web in anonymity ultimately spell doom for the wider march towards open data?
So-called ‘open data’ is supposed to be an instrument for breaking down information gaps across industries and letting companies share benchmarks and best practices that raise productivity – all information should be open and that should (theoretically) inc...

Technology changes at the speed of light. To say it can be hard to keep up is an understatement. For performance engineers, taking charge of your own continuing education is one of the most important things you can do to remain at the top of your game.

JavaScript is primarily a client-based dynamic scripting language most commonly used within web browsers as client-side scripts to interact with the user, browser, and communicate asynchronously to servers.
If you have been part of any web-based development, odds are you have worked with JavaScript in one form or another. In this article, I'll focus on the aspects of JavaScript that are releva...

The Internet of Things (IoT) has quickly become the next “be all to end all” in information technology. Touted as how cloud computing will connect everyday things together, it is also feared as the real- life instantiation of The Terminator’s Skynet, where sentient robot team with an omnipresent and all-knowing entity that uses technology to control, and ultimately destroy, all of humanity.

Most developers learn best by examples, which naturally tend to simplify matters and omit things that aren’t essential for understanding. This means that the “Hello World” example, when used as starting point for an application, may be not suitable for production scenarios at all.
I started using Node.js like that and I have to confess that it took me almost two years to quantify the huge perform...

As a recent graduate, and now professor in the University of Connecticut's Business Analytics and Project Management masters program, I have a lot of conversations surrounding the topic of "Big Data" and questions such as, "What does that term actually mean?"
Big Data is a fairly new topic and what seems to be an elusive term for many. Conversations are important to help bring clarity to Big Data...

Knowledge management, in business terms, refers to saving, developing, sharing, and effectively using knowledge for the benefit of organization. It refers to a multi-disciplined approach of achieving organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.
Scientia potentia est (Latin proverb meaning "knowledge is power") attributed to 16th century philosopher Sir Francis Bacon is nowadays ...

It is interesting to me, how quickly the hype cycle of a good thing can turn it into a monster that will inevitably eat itself, leaving a much smaller – and much more useful – concept or toolset behind. It has happened over and over in high tech, one need only say “XML” to understand what I mean. It is definitely a useful tool for some jobs, but the “XML Everywhere” craze was insane. People declar...

As companies embrace the DevOps movement, they rely heavily on automation to improve the time to market for new features and services. DevOps is a long, never-ending journey with a goal of continuously improving the software delivery process, resulting in better products and services and, ultimately, happier customers. At the beginning of their DevOps journeys, many companies focus on continuous i...

We Need a Holistic Network Infrastructure: Why Controllers Are Not Cutting It
For years, we've relied too heavily on individual network functions or simplistic cloud controllers. However, they are no longer enough for today's modern cloud data center. Businesses need a comprehensive platform architecture in order to deliver a complete networking suite for IoT environment based on OpenStack.
In h...

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.